with his exceedingly long purple tongue. Then he stepped up beside her and looked at the screen. There was the sad- faced man with the bluebird-wings mustache. 'What are you playing?" the Minotaur asked. "Ziggurat," the new girl told him, and when he didn't say anything in reply she told him about all the other games she had discovered on the computer. And then she said, "Basically, theyre all disap- pointment games. Except this one. This one's about ambition. You're supposed to build the Tower of Babel before God knocks it down. But that usually ends up being a disappointment game, too." And when the Minotaur still didn't sayany- thing she said, "Basically, this is a pretty stupid bunch of games." "Then why do you play them?" the Minotaur said. ''Just. . ." The new girl blushed, then went pale. 'Well. . . you know. It's like I said before." After that, she put her hands in her lap, became very quiet, and seemed to shrink to half her size. The Minotaur figured that this was her way of telling him the time had come for him to eat her. But, just as his big lips went glossy and he was baring his shovel teeth, she said, "I like to play pool, though. poor s a great game. Do you like to play pool?" The Minotaur looked over at the table, which, he was embarrassed to discover, had been stained by many nights of drool, as well as by other secretions. He wasn't quite sure why this embarrassed him, however. Embarrassment had not played a big part in his long life. "I don't know," he said. And when he saw that the new girl did not fully com- prehend his answer he said, "I've never played." "Do you want me to teach you?" she asked. The Minotaur shrugged. The new girl beat the pants off the Mi- notaur three times in a row. Even though he didn't particularly seem to mind, she worried that he might get irritated or bored if he kept losing, so she decided to acquaint him with a more advanced level of strategy. She gave him tips about wrist action, momentum, angles of incidence, about which part of the cue ball to hit when, and about the need to care just enough that you noticed you cared, but no 68 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 29,2009 more than that. The Minotaur turned out to be a fast learner. On their fifth game, he beat her fair and square. A gainst the wall beside the pool table :was a half-size refrigerator jammed with beer. "Oh, wow!" the new girl said. She looked at the Minotaur and pulled out a bottle of Rolling Rock. "Want one?" "Thanks." He took the bottle and held it up a few inches from the end of his nose. His bristling eyebrows buclded in a way that made him seem excessively stu- pid, like a caveman examining a light bulb. When he saw the new girl twist the top off her bottle, he did the same, and when she took a sip he did, too. "Oh!" he said, and examined the bottle even more attentively. "Something wrong?" the new girl asked. "N 0," he said. He took another sip, which he kept in his mouth a long time, his eyebrows parting, moving up his fore- head, then shooting back down into a col- lision of uncertainty. When he swallowed, he seemed to be paying acute attention to the fluid's descent along his esophagus and into his belly. "Haven't you ever had a beer before?" the new girl said. " N tl " ot exac y. " N :l " ot exactry. " I I " mean no, guess. " w I" h . I . d " y , ow. t e new glr sal. ou ve never shot pool, you've never played com- puter games, you've never drunk a beer- what have you been doing with your life?" The Minotaur shrugged. "I don't kn " h . d ' w d . tl " ow, e Sa!. an erlng, mos y. ' w d . " an enng. ''Yeah.'' His big lips formed an upside- down U, expressing something between defensiveness and disappointment. "T d . " Justwan erlng. He glanced up at the ceiling and tilted his head noncommittally. "Of course," he said, "I'm always . . . You know: hun- I " gry . .. mean- The Minotaur stopped talking. The new girl didn't say anything, either. After close to a minute of silence, he . d " s " Sa!, orry. "Don't worry about it," she said, but didn't meet his eye. There was another long silence. ''Just so you know," the new girl said, "I'm not actually a virgin. That was just something I . . . I mean, who likes to talk about that kind of stuffwith their mother, you know? So I just let her believe what- ever she wanted to, and . . . Well, maybe that wasn't such a hot idea. . . . Anyhow, the main thing is, you might not like the way I taste. Too tough or something. You might get indigestion from me." The new girl laughed nervously. The Minotaur made a small noise deep in his throat and looked away. Then he drew the back of his hand across his lips. ' w hat's a virgin?" the Minotaur asked. Their half-empty bottles stood on the edge of the pool table. They were playing another game. ''You know," she insisted. He didn't. ''Yes, you do. They always told us vir- gins were like. . . you know: like your fa- vorite-" She couldn't say it. When the Minotaur still seemed con- fused, she gave him a hint. Then she gave him a bigger hint. Finally, she just explained the concept of virginity straight out. "Huh," he said. And then he said, "I can't see why that would affect the taste." Then he didn't say anything else. The new girl stood the butt of her cue stick on her big toe and looked down at the floor. She was shrinking again. W hat is the Labyrinth but so much human junk? That's how the Mi- notaur saw it. Cathedrals, bus stations, diners, bowling alleys, subway tunnels, endless basement corridors-they all seemed profoundly pointless to him, not just because they were generally empty and unused but as a basic fact of their existence. He could tell that humans didn't share his opinion. He would find them on their knees in the pink and purple pools beneath stained-glass windows, their brows dark with grief and desire, their lips rippling with unvoiced words. He would find them looking impatiently at classroom clocks, unable to keep their feet still beneath their desks, or sitting atop vinyl-covered swivel stools, savoring their own tasteless and puny repasts, or intertwined in bed, mak- ing all the chest and throat noises of ag- gression. Idiocy. All of it. None of the things they yearned for would come to